Data center efficiency has become big business in recent years, with startups like Power Assure getting into the business along with power engineering giants IBM, General Electric and HP. Now there is one more company in the mix, SM Group International, an international engineering firm based in Montreal that is tackling the cooling methods with claimed savings up to 50 percent.

SMi Group’s patent-pending technology isn’t actually new technology at all, but rather a paradigm shift in how to go about lifting heat off of the computers. “We said, let’s try to remove equipment and simplify the equation,” said Jean-Simon Venne, head of the energy efficiency division.

The key to the system is to pressurize the space and blow area directly over the servers before the heat builds up. It also uses traditional strategies, like precooling. But in warm environments, like Miami or Singapore, precooling can only cut down on energy use about 10 percent of the time, said Venne. Data centers account for about 2 percent of electricity use in the U.S. and that figure is growing.

After SMi focused on optimizing precooling, the engineers asked themselves, “Why don’t we just put the computer in a wind tunnel instead of pushing cold air into a square room?”

The combination of moving air efficiently in a pressurized environment cut the energy use by up to 50 percent. But the even bigger savings is that the configuration of SMi’s data centers can cut capital costs by up to 40 percent. Because SMi has also cut down on the equipment needed overall in the data center, Venne said they could also cut the construction time by up to 25 percent.

Venne compared the pressure to somewhere between sea level and riding in an airplane. “Think of how dry an airplane is,” he said. “It’s that simple.”

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